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Author Topic: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?  (Read 4525 times)

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Offline WhakaTopic starter

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OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« on: June 27, 2017, 12:33:57 AM »
Hi,

on OS 3.9, since BB2 if i remember well... the defaut color when you select "sort by name" for listing drawers, is a kind of light blue, instead of good old black in earlier OS versions.
idk why they did this horrible choice, it's hard to read for me...

a pic is still better : https://img15.hostingpics.net/pics/797145drawer.jpg

i never find how to set it in black, it seems there's no option in prefs. someone tried ?
thanks :)
« Last Edit: June 27, 2017, 12:40:38 AM by Whaka »
 

Offline Matt_H

Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #1 on: June 27, 2017, 02:24:14 PM »
I, for one, prefer the blue, since it's a way to differentiate the drawers from other files. And it matches the look of DOpus. ;)

I'm not sure if there is a setting to adjust the color. OS4.x definitely has one, but if there is one in 3.9, it's probably an ENV variable that you need to set manually. If it is documented, the info is probably in the BB2 readme/changelog. Check the BB1 docs as well, just to be safe. A hex read of workbench.library might also reveal something. As a final thought, also have a look at the commandline arguments for LoadWB.
 

Offline olsen

Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #2 on: June 27, 2017, 03:21:35 PM »
Quote from: Whaka;827644
Hi,

on OS 3.9, since BB2 if i remember well... the defaut color when you select "sort by name" for listing drawers, is a kind of light blue, instead of good old black in earlier OS versions.
idk why they did this horrible choice, it's hard to read for me...
I'm the guilty party who opted for this choice of colour. It was a difficult decision to make, although in my defence (if you would accept that) I did not have much choice, except perhaps to make an even worse decision.

The reason why the colours for files and drawers, respectively, are different was to allow the different types to be visually distinct at first glance. We tried slanted/bold font styles in place of the different colours, but the results were even less readable than what we ended up with, eventually. Underlining was already used for a different purpose (underlined drawer entries refer to soft/hard links).

So, that's why it had to be a different colour, and for that matter, a hard-coded different colour. The Amiga user interface scheme introduced with Workbench 2.0 has to work both in two colour and in four colour screen modes. Because of how Workbench renders drawer contents in text mode, we were limited to a maximum of two colours.

The colour for files is black, which is colour #1 (the background is colour #0). We couldn't use colour #2 (white) for drawers, because on a two colour display, #2 would have been indistinguishable from colour #0.

This only left colour #3, which "works" both in two and four colour screen modes. Sorry, there was not enough flexibility in making Workbench's built-in icon rendering work better with the choice of user interface colours.

Workbench renders the drawer contents like icons, even if the contents are shown in text mode. This means that chip memory is allocated for each entry, and the amount of memory reserved for showing the text has to be kept under control.

Had there been more time available to rework the text mode display code, these curious limitations would have gone away, eventually. The Workbench resisted change, and still valiantly keeps resisting, after all those years :(

Quote
i never find how to set it in black, it seems there's no option in prefs. someone tried ?
thanks :)

Sorry, the drawer colour is hard-coded for the sad reasons I mentioned above :(  The only way to make both files and drawers come out in exactly the same colour is to switch your screen into two colour mode (which is not necessarily an improvement).
 

Offline Gulliver

Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #3 on: June 27, 2017, 03:47:11 PM »
@olsen

Perhaps you could simply point the offset and values that must be changed in workbench.library to alter those colors.
 

Offline olsen

Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #4 on: June 27, 2017, 06:02:56 PM »
Quote from: Gulliver;827665
@olsen

Perhaps you could simply point the offset and values that must be changed in workbench.library to alter those colors.
Easier said than done... I'm not 100% certain that I can rebuild the workbench.library version which shipped with the AmigaOS 3.9 update, producing exactly the same binary.

In the library version which I can build, the following bytes contain the code which sets the drawer name rendering colour to #3:

Code: [Select]
7E03 0C40 7E01
That's "moveq #3,d7; cmpi.w #$7e01,d0", which in the version I could build appears exactly once in the library.

Find that pattern and change it to the following sequence, to make the drawer name rendering colour come out as #1:

Code: [Select]
7E01 0C40 7E01
« Last Edit: June 28, 2017, 08:00:37 AM by olsen »
 

Offline Matt_H

Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #5 on: June 27, 2017, 07:44:32 PM »
@ olsen

Thanks for the history lesson! :)
 

Offline WhakaTopic starter

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Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #6 on: June 27, 2017, 09:54:01 PM »
@olsen

thank you, this did the trick with workbench.library 45.127 :)
but i have BB4 and workbench.library 45.137 (i kept 45.127 in safe place, in case of... and i was right), and it don't work with this version.

in this one, the chain is
Code: [Select]
7E03 0C40 7A01so, i tried replace by
Code: [Select]
7A01 0C40 7A01and  
Code: [Select]
7E01 0C40 7E01but this don't work. color stay the same.
i'm not good at coding, so i don't really understand what i'm doing :lol:
 

Offline Gulliver

Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #7 on: June 27, 2017, 10:04:08 PM »
@olsen

Thank you. It works. :)

@Whaka

If you are using v45.137 you should ask Cosmos, as that is a hacked version of workbench.library, so only he knows what he did.

Mr. Olsen only did the original/official one.
 

Offline WhakaTopic starter

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Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #8 on: June 28, 2017, 01:34:57 AM »
for personal reason, i no longer speak with him from longtime now... stupid story...

but anyway, i didn't give up.
so, for 45.137 :

find
Code: [Select]
7E03 6002 7E01replace by
Code: [Select]
7E01 6002 7E01:)
 

Offline SACC-guy

Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #9 on: June 28, 2017, 02:30:37 AM »
double post sorry
 

Offline SACC-guy

Re: OS 3.9 change "sort by name" font color ?
« Reply #10 on: June 28, 2017, 02:31:49 AM »
@Olson

Quote from: SACC-guy;827685
Wow, Great info!!!